Users are increasingly obtaining content in digital format, often downloading or streaming that content from a remote service. In many cases the content will relate to “live” streaming media content that is transmitted to users as soon as the content can be captured and prepared for transmission over one or more communication channels. Preparing the content for transmission often includes encoding the content using different encoding parameters for each channel. Such an approach involves a complex, hierarchical nested schema and network interface that are compatible with the encoding system. Further, the sets of encoding parameters determined according to this schema need to be managed for various versions of an encoding engine, with each upgrade of the engine requiring a manual review and update of the schema and associated data.